Does humor play an important role in life?

This is an essay made in class, and it corresponds to our English project about humor. It has the objective of fulfilling the structure of an argumentative text, dealing about a topic which hasn't been chosen by me.

Humor seems to be a general human trait. Everyone is able to laugh –as long as it's not impossible due to factors which aren't related to human nature–, and that makes humor a good way to build bonds between persons.

"Stop having fun right now!"

For instance, science seems to point out that humor plays a determining role in our lives: it turns out that laughing makes them healthier and longer. Apart from its biological benefits, though, humor has also been proven to make socializing much easier and much more enjoyable, which is crucial in contexts like workplaces.

However, there are many points of view that take humor as something unimportant or even negative. In fact, remarkable authors of the History of Western Philosophy like Plato describe humour and other pleasures and passions as something that must be avoided in order to focus on useful work for society and the gathering of knowledge.

Regarding my own opinion, as a human being –and as a rageful detractor of Plato–, I'm on the pro-humor side: it makes us feel good and it helps us bond, why should we avoid such a blessing?

About the oral presentation

 "Why do you love me?
Why do you love me?"

"Why Do You Love Me" - Garbage

As a class task, after an oral presentation about a variety of topics that were once supposed to fit a limited number of categories, we've been told to rewatch ourselves and judge how we did. My presentation was about activism, in the sense of fighting (in a non-violent way, of course) for the sake of pursuing a certain objective related to a societal change or the suppression of a social issue.

As I started speaking, my fantastic ideas of interacting with the crowd with striking questions and keeping everyone awake with the dynamization of ideas, as well as part of the content, vaporized from my mind like sublimating iodine, leaving a trace of purple smoke only my almost-crying brain could see. And, as the presentation went on, so did my nervousness and the disappearing of any strand of excellence my humble work could harbour: by the time I was exposing historical examples of activism, I was almost trembling and I'm not really sure I was speaking English... or any language ever known by Mankind.

Things became a bit less panic-inducing with the topic moving towards the possibility of activism in our generation. My interactionism came back and I could somehow speak to one of the other students without stuttering too much. Overall, the ending wasn't so terrible.

Hello, this Heather about presentation made by activism...

Another detail was the informatical support. I knew from minute one that my OpenOffice Impress presentation was lame and uninteresting, consisting solely on coloured textboxes with different typographies and spawning animations; the thing, I guess, is that this should serve me as an opportunity to learn why making a presentation during the bus trip to school with a netbook is never a good idea: presentations are not presentations without content copied from the Net.

After watching myself, I realise I've been even too optimistic; it's not that I was nervous: I was practically numb. I'm still going through long sessions of meditation in order to reach a conclusion regarding how the hell my classmates knew it was me, or anybody at all. Another issue is how the whole presentation was like "hi, this is me, now GO FIGHT FOR MY RIGHTS, MY BELOVED ALLIES!" I've never considered myself to be a good despot either way.

So, yes, my presentation was an incredibly overrated mush of overlooked vocabulary meant to hide an obvious lack of content and a terrible informatical support. But, you know what the worst part is? Everyone said I was the best.

Religion as a mass control method

"Unless I watch you disappear in to the ground

My one mistake was that I never let you down,

So I'll waste my time

And I'll burn my mind,

I'm Miss Nothing,

I miss everything."

"Miss Nothing" - The Pretty Reckless

Experience leads us to the conclusion that every human being requires, by nature, a system of beliefs, which can range from the firm conviction that there's a spaghetti monster watching over Mankind to the common conception that the existence of the world around us is an absolute truth. Beliefs, though, have a wide variety of origins and natures: some come from philosophic statements from known authors, some are taken as a trait Humanity has had since its very origin, some require certain rites and actions such as praying and some don't imply any specific action taken.

Love it or love it twice, but love it either way.

Once the prior has been stated, it's important to stress on those belief systems that require us to take action in certain ways. In our day and age, we're witnesses of the existence of many generalized belief systems known as religions that share the trait of morally forcing their believers to do so. That obligation, however, doesn't assume the believer will do it for the sake of religious devotion: no, in most* cases, in order to make sure believers follow the established path, religions threaten them with elements like eternal punishment after death or dishonour.

And, once again, it's important to highlight one detail of what has been exposed: in most cases, believers follow the rites and paths of their religion with the sole purpose of avoiding a negative consequence of not doing so; in other words, they do so because they fear what might happen otherwise.

Though this trait major religions of our world share has a very important outcome, it's not what I wish to focus on. On of the things that catch my eye the most is the societal imposition of the beliefs that conform a religion (or, said in a better way, of the fear leading to a certain religion). In an environment where a concrete religion is present (call it a family, a social group, or a intellectually-third-world country), individuals who are yet to form an established opinion and, therefore, are still predisposed to acquire a belief system, are unconsciously forced to, as I call it, "breathe what's in the air," or, in other words, adopt the predominant religion in the context.

Religions are not innate ideas, they are passed from individual to individual in a variety of ways, majorly involving some kind of social imposition or assumption. A pattern that comes up as incredibly useful to exemplify this is the case for sects, where, for the sake of acceptance in a social group, an often extremely delusional belief system, mostly created in recent times with the conscious objective of manipulating a group of individuals, is adopted, often leading to actions such as the transferring of material possessions to the manipulator or even collective suicide rites.

See? Jesus looks the other way.

Leaving that behind, another one of the traits most religions share which captures my attention is the value those religions tend to assign to the believers' actions, whether they are strictly religious acts or not. Most religions assume the objective of our physical life is pleasing a higher entity in order to gain salvation and avoid the punishment I mentioned before. This implies the demotion of Humanity from feeling entities, able to decide what to do and to do it for the sake of themselves and others, to slaves of a deity with no other worth than making God get a boner (sorry for that, I might be getting a bit angry here.)

And, yet again, this leads me to something I've already spoken about: in this case, Humanism. Believing the people around are worthy of love and believing in most religions are not compatible.

The list could go on and on. I know this doesn't do the job as a proof that religions are wrong, but it does prove they are the first thing to get rid of when trying to improve one's own life.

*Whenever the word "most" is used with religions, it has the sole objective of excluding exceptions with almost no representation in our western world like Buddhism. Major religions (Christianity, Islam and Jewism) fall to the definition used to write this post.

Let's talk about #SoyGayYDelPP

"Do you get a little kick out of being slow-minded?"

"F*ck You" - Lily Allen

I've already made my insight on Spanish politics. It isn't a topic I especially want in my blog, but as a person who knows which factors my life and future are driven by, I know the worst I can possibly do for myself is ignoring it.

However, politics as a topic has many spheres and issues to deal about. Political parties are in a constant struggle to convince overevolved monkeys like us that they are relatable from their unrealistic state of apparently sempiternal –until someone grabs a gun– economic privilege, and, for the pursue of that end, they have the need of using certain displays of character with the focus of resembling those outside that privilege state.

One of those desperate attempts to catch the vast minority's attention was the spreading of the Spain-bound epidemic known in social media like Twitter as #SoyGayYDelPP (something like #I'mGayAndIMilitateThePP). And, as to discuss about it, I'd like to analyze what that hashtag says, just the meaning of the words.

We're before a statement of the structure "I'm part of an LGBT collective and of a right-wing party." It's not that it's a common structure in other sentences of the kind, it's just that the structure is important in this case: this could basically translate to "I'm part of a minority and I'm against equality."

Friends of gays, lesbians and social inequality

And, no, the right wing cannot be pro-equality. The right wing is, as an ideology, the defense of a system based on the generation of inequality, at least in the economic plane –also known as Capitalism–, so it is a contradiction to have equality in any sense as a finality and sympathise with the right wing. However, this translated to the LGBT sphere makes yet another twist: we're speaking about a collective of LGBT persons who want not equality for LGBT minorities but individual privilege for themselves: we're not speaking about a mass, or even a minority, we're speaking about a lobby.

And I think by this point we can all recognize where the problem is.

We cannot fight back against people reducing our struggle to "the gay lobby's agenda" when the public eye's grasp is filling with people proving them right: how can I tell a homophobe that gays don't want to have privilege over heterosexuals or even that gays aren't everything inside the LGBT collective when everything that can be seen are gays seeking individual privilege?

This could even link to other problems and issues related to LGBT rights and visibility if overlooked: it perpetuates the stereotyping of the homosexual male while also contributing to the undercategorization and dismissal of other LGBT minorities: we're not speaking about a political party with a stablishing diverse LGBT circle like Podemos or with even a long stablished one and even with transgender visible members and deputies like PSOE, no, we're before the common representation of the gay –rich, white– man as the totality of the LGBT collective, stereotyping and nomalization included. That, though, is another issue.

About engagement and arts online

"Jim told me that

He hit me and it felt like a kiss."

"Ultraviolence" - Lana Del Rey

I'm not an artist, I think calling myself so would be egotistical and excessively self-flattering, but when it comes to artistic disciplines like writing I do consider myself some kind of an initiate: I think I've spoken my mind about why Wattpad isn't exactly the best place to progress as a writer in certain areas, genres or topics, but it's still an adequate place to share and publish written compositions and, if one is lucky, get noticed, receive feedback and get help to improve.

However, this benefit coming from the sharing of one's work with a public audience wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for what that audience does, and that's where problems start. There isn't any inherent obligation for art consumers to contact authors in any way, but I think it's more than demandable that we, as viewers, readers, listeners or whatever, make an effort in order to detect whether or not an author is looking for opinions from us. This is especially important when we're before novice authors in websites that are meant to allow a more or less direct interaction between writers and readers (as is the case between composers and listeners, illustrators and viewers, etcetera) like the so-mentioned webpage or DeviantArt.

This is something I personally do whenever I'm able to: a direct comment section is a good place to point out the good things one likes about what they've seen. If that leads to a private conversation between author and viewer, the last can politely ask if the creator desires further feedback and, if the response is affirmative, then and only then kindly point out what one doesn't like or thinks could be improved, always respecting the author's decision to either change the spoken aspects or not. The point is keeping interaction friendly and constructive. If someone follows these directions while ignoring the principles in bold, they are probably not worth much of our attention.

Either way, this can be done terribly wrong even when trying to be exclusively flattering, and this is when my own experience as a person who writes in Wattpad comes in handy. A story of mine, the title of which I prefer not to reveal in this post, deals about a teenage girl who falls in love with a classmate. At some point of the story, the main character has to charm an older student in order to acomplish her goal, leading this older character to fall in love with her. During a concrete chapter, the protagonist was crying scared because that older student, in a tantrum, had hit her against a wall and caused her to bleed. Over that scene of abuse and defeat, someone kindly commented "This story is so beatiful, I hope they end up together."

At the very moment I read that comment, I ragefully thought of the possibility of the author of it commiting the trascending crime of the romanticizing of gender abuse, though I later got to the conclusion the reader hadn't really read the chapter they were commenting on and just referred to the initial situation, expecting that all the storyline would revolve around the same state.

So, whatever the way, the point of interaction is being nice... but sensible.

About grit and the Growth Mindset

 "I get knocked down,
But I get up again,
They're never gonna keep me down!"

"Tubthumping" - Chimbawamba

About half a week ago, we watched one of the well-known TED Talks in English class as a motif for our class project about dreams. It was a speech given by an asian-looking woman about her career as an educator and psychologist and especially as a researcher in areas related to motivation and reasons of success in areas like teaching, studies and the military.

Long story short, the speech stressed on the significance grit has in terms of success and failure, shown to be not only more important than inherent capacity but also mostly non-related or even inversely related to it. It also introduced an idea, and this is the part of it that called my bluff the most, called the Growth Mindset: it is the belief that failures constitute a positive reinforcement towards success, introduced to kids from the lowest levels of education with the objective of making it a part of their own mindset.

This is the idea I take from it because of all the things that have been proven to be conditioned by education (and by education I mean not only school but also what we see in our environment and get messages from) rather than by own structure: yes, I know this sounds really typical coming from a transgender, but I'm one of those people who believe even gender is built after birth.

The thing is, if there is really a way to take a step in this area and create a generalized mindset promoting grit, motivation and the acceptance of failure, it would not only prove how plastic our minds are but also solve a popular and widespread issue like academic failure is.

Opinion essay: the selective forbidding of culture

"You're going to fly
High in the sky
You want your place in the sun"
"Place In The Sun" - Chris Child

Everybody should have the right to earn a living out of what they like to do. I think denying that would be far  away from following my own argumental line and even further away from advocating for human freedom. However, when it comes to culture, I think there is an ethical black hole in the way this aspect is being treated.

Yes, before you ask, I endorse piracy. It is illegal, and it harms the people I admire the most, but it has that effect because of reasons far from the grasp and control of those commiting that illegality. Let me be clear about it, if an artist is known enough, the fact that their content is available for free makes them even more known by system: everyone can know them without paying a cent; and also makes those who already know the artist able to enjoy all of their content regardless of their economic position. And, if the artist is good enough, a big enough fraction of their fanbase will voluntarily want to pay of that content in order to support its creator: I have bought music myself, but the same tracks I acquired by paying are tracks I had downloaded for free previously so I could be sure they were good enough.

I advocate for culture, and I sure do advocate for those enjoying it to support their creator, but I also do advocate for freedom and sharing of ideas, concepts and feelings, and I think that is what art is. The reason why artists are suffering from piracy is no other than the unnecessarily overgrowing comission promotors, record labels and other parasites inherently super-necessary structures are taking. Of course those structures do help artists considering how art industries work, but in a perfect world they wouldn't even exist.

The closing of goear for Spanish computers and devices, for example, comes to my mind. I've always used goear as a reliable source for audios, music and other platforms I'm happy to use in my blog. It's not forbidden in many countries, and it appears as obvious to me that if our government was based on any other pronciple than money greed it wouldn't even be so here.

Film review: Alice Through the Looking Glass

"The normals, they make me afraid
The crazies, they make me feel sane"

"Mad Hatter" - Melanie Martinez 

Last week, it was the second time I went out with my brother to see a movie at the cinema. Since we did it for the first time with Ratchet & Clank the week before, I find it a nice, fun and good habit to keep up with, and I'd certainly do it again, without a shadow of a doubt.

This time that I'm talking about we went to watch Alice Through the Looking Glass, the second part of the venerated and revered version of Alice in Wonderland by Tim Burton. Regarding that first movie, I must say it definitely holds a special place between my favourite films of all time: the way the story is gracefully changed in order to make an original and epic new plot, the ellegantly redesigned characters, everything introduced by the movie was awesome, surprising and thrilling.

However, when it comes to the second part, I found it was a bit disappointing at times. Don't get me wrong, the concept, the figure represented by a strong main character refusing to play the social role given by her time and social estate, the way the element of Time is personalized and represented, the replenishing of dark spots in the story by the exploration of the characters' past, every main characteristic was just wonderful and amazing.

The thing is, the target public this time seemed to be even younger, and being a sixteen-year-old with a twenty-year-old by my side felt even a bit unconfortable at some times. It was not an important flaw, but it added some imperfections to the artistic-narrative side of the film. The incoherence of, for example, Time, when he is super-friends with Alice after everything that happens, as an example, makes me cringe, and even my brother pointed that same detail out when we were getting out of the cinema. The first movie, at least from our perspective, was more enjoyable also for older watchers, and it shone precisely because of that artistic faction.

Though, I think that element of approaching younger viewers also gives good points to the film: if you've seen it, I'm pretty sure you can refer to a spot or two where you laughed! Ratchet & Clank had the same "flaw," to say it somehow, and it was still a great movie!

"Mom, why did dad go to war?"

"Where is your heart?

Humanity, rise!

You think you are Gods, hah,

But everyone dies."

"1944" - Jamala

I can't remember the last time I saw in a movie the typical scene where an official or someone of the kind is carrying a country's flag (normally the U.S., because it's obvious other countries are not populated by humans, who dares to say the opposite?) and a fallen soldier's boots for their (I mean, his; these movies are not smart enough to feature women in the army) widow, normally with a sad song as a backing. It's always made me laugh, especially when there's that living stereotype known as child (or, in this case, orphan) crying and doing sad things because, oh my God, sadness and such.

NOT a career to choose for fun.

Honestly, if someone has gone to war (especially considering the usual role the U.S. have in wars) and I'm told they're dead, I think I just earned a reason to be happy: this world has one less murderer to care about. If one of my parents decides to become a soldier right now, in the state Spain is in, I don't need them to die to consider myself an orphan anyway.

I'm not saying all soldiers are inherently bad: I'm saying if a country is not being forced into war, every person allowing bellic conflict to involve it, which includes the country's army, is equally responsible for the consequences of that war. Not all of the country's population, but the army: if the Paris attacks had affected only militars as a revenge for bombing Syria as if they had any business there, I'd be inviting all of you to a big party at my place; sadly, a serious tragedy happened instead.

But then there's the case: a country is forced into war. When is this possible?

1. Causes from inside the country (see also, civil wars).
2. Invasion, which is caused by the existence of soldiers from another country.

And, even then, it seems obvious to me that, basically, wars can only be caused by three factors: money, power and glory (and, yes, that's the title of a Lana Del Rey song, I know). The slogan of "protecting your country" only works because people are dumb enough to buy it. If our countries were in any actual danger, believe me, as civil population, we'd notice. Rare thing is, now we just happen to be in a seemingly dangerous time in Europe: it seems the fact that Americans annihilated Iraqis a decade or so ago made somebody angry and now someone else has to pay for it.

I don't even know why I'm writing this. Keep glorificating murderers and crying on social media when the families of their victims come to Europe and kill us, then instantly relate refugees to that. Isn't that ethical?

Situational loneliness

"No one here to save me drowning,
'cause, baby, you're not here with me...

And I keep calling, calling
Keep calling, cause...

Now my heart awakes to the sound of silence"

"Sound Of Silence" - Dami Im

I'm a bit of a walking contradiction at times. I always tell myself I'm building myself up by expressing artistically, mainly through drawing and writing, and, though I know that's what I should focus on, I still want to commit the psychological suicide entering in a romantic relationship represents.

It seems like an inherent need. When I was in my first relationship, I didn't realize how disasterous it had been until almost a year from breaking up: I had been psychologically abused, kept for the sake of being with someone and finally substituted with a cis girl, and it took me ten months to realize it hadn't been my fault. Even after having been telling myself for so long that "I'm a monster and nobody will ever love me," I still seem to need to force events towards a future relationship of the same kind.

I know I can't blame anyone but me, but I also know I'm far more worth it than the way any man could have treated me in a relationship so far. However, I acknowledge how close to the most I can aspire to that is: I can't ask for someone to adapt completely to my expectations, and nobody's perfect soulmate exists; that's precisely what makes these relationships interesting.

My conclusions from all of my reflections are just that it's not that I must not give up on trying to get a satisfactory relationship: it's just that the only way to win the game is giving up. I know I must give me time to spend on myself, on progressing both as a person and on the things I like to do, on moving forward in my way... But I see myself surrounded by desirable men, by chances, by my own loneliness...

And I keep wondering if there is a chance one of them could approach me.

Wattpad, furries and glowsticks

(EXPLICIT LANGUAGE WARNING)

 

  
"Alright, how would it make you feel if I said you never made me cum?
In the year and a half that we spent together,
Yeah, I never really had much fun."

"Not Big" - Lily Allen

 (The content of this post is an exaggeration. I have found well-written pieces on Wattpad and I'm really happy with the existing content, but I also think in most cases enjoying one of those stories requires growing a sort of resistance against poor language, at least for me.)

Honestly, I don't think I have to specify anything about my likes anymore. It's not (only) that I made them more than explicit in last post, it's that I think they are not something I must hide; at least, not yet. Of course, as a person who has certain likes, I like to find well-made content around the Internet regarding those; not only sexual content, of course.

However, while in areas like image or multimedia I'm proud to say people with my same likes have created a really rich variety of content, when it comes to literature I find myself frustrated: I am sure and full of hopes that I haven't known every piece of content out on the Net, but I've known a few so far, and I've been pretty disappointed to be honest. Let me express why.

I consider two aspects to be determining of the quality of a writing, and those are content and linguistics. I have to be fair to both myself and the compositions I'm talking about and admit their content is not bad. Actually, I would say it's quite good, and that's why, while none of those have reached an 8 out of 10 for me, neither any of them have fallen lower than a 5 on the same scale.

The problem is, then, linguistics. I think I speak for a considerable fraction of Humanity when I say issues like arbitrary capital letters after commas (or semicolons) or the absence of them at the start of paragraphs can be a bit annoying for readers. I'm pretty sure they don't represent an important problem for the specific public that content is meant to get to, but I also think that the number of people inside that category could easily grow if they were solved.

Another story is stereotypes and homogenity. At first, one could find bara/yaoi furry stories on Wattpad cute, sexy and nice, but I think that feeling withers away a bit after the fourth time of reading the same with different authors and slightly different narrative frames. I think that, inside the (good and likable for me, I'm not saying the opposite) festival of bellies, muscles and erupting volcanos and glowsticks, something new and exciting could easily spice things up; like, let's say, an actual plot.

"The glowing liquid was running through my dark ass..."

Why not make a more or less complex story that makes readers laugh, feel and think (think!) where sexual scenes are a side element? Stories of the kind with plots are easy to find, and sometimes good, but they usually fall to the category "the 99% of the things happening here is an excuse for these two to fuck and the resting 1% is my teenage life problems;" I mean, please.

However, I do believe in furry writers. And I do believe in the authors of the stories I've read so far. I just fall to think I'm not part of the collective to enjoy their creations, and that is okay. They might annoy me, make me visit a hospital or two because of eye infection and cry out of frustration, but the only one causing that is me. But I do know what to do as well: if I want content for the likes of me to exist, someone has to start creating it, and that may as well be me! I know I'm as inexpert and bad at writing as the authors I've been talking about are, but I also know I'll get better with time and that means I'll be able to write something actually enjoyable some day.

Because there should be content for everyone to enjoy out there!

Is sexual perversion a thing?

"We're not so different, you and me

'Cause we both share our share of obscenities.

And everybody's got some freaky tendencies,

Hidden or admitted, 'cause we all got needs.

And I make no apology."

"Phonography" - Britney Spears 

The Internet is a beautiful place. Everything one has to keep in secret in the outside world is possibly exposable without major consequences on the Net, giving every human a chance to express the rarest of their feelings, making a place for every thought, strange or not, to bloom up and find others who share it, creating communities, friendships, relationships, marriages, around those thoughts.

However, the diversity of these thoughts troubles some. It's easy to find certain parts of the Internet easily marked as "sick," "ill" or "disgusting." I'm talking about every kind of thought, and every kind of content one can find in and out of the Internet comes from thoughts. Don't get me wrong, not every action is acceptable, but the existence and accessibility of every kind of content is.

One of the most common responses I get when speaking out about this is the case for pedophilia. Must there be content (assuming: sexual content) for pedophiles out there? Yes, absolutely. For the protection of children, people who can't help feeling sexual attraction to them must have a way to relieve sexually without involving a real child, that should be the logical thought of every person who wants to keep child molesting from happening. If, then, accessing that kind of content is criminalized, the debate regarding unavoidable sexual preference as a crime must be taken into account: should people who prefer having sexual interaction with people from their same sex be treated as criminals for having sexual likes they can't avoid?

The point is using wit. One does not need to involve an existing entity with certain characteristics in any way to satisfy a fetish, philia or paraphilia regarding those characteristics. That's been proven. There are tons of content of the kind featuring fictional characters and objects that can be emulated with unthinkable realism and fidelity. As referring to the previous example, I am not attracted to people under my age; contrarily, people I'm attracted to easily double my age as the x-year-old person I am while I write this, so it is hard for me to refer to examples of it to prove my last point, but I can think of uncountable examples of content of the kind suitable for people with likes like mine without involving any existing, disconforming or not, entity.

♥ See what I mean? ♥ [Art by Grisser; safe version]

After I've made this clear, there's a question I want to throw to anyone reading this. Can sexual likes, or any kind of individual interest, be harmful? Can sexuality be a form of perversion? Why? My answer is no, they can't. It can't. Sexuality itself, with our sexual likes, fetishes, philias, is the best thing we have. It can make us enjoy ourselves in a way nothing else can. And if someone [over/at the age of consent and in their full capacity of reason and agreement, by the way] agrees, making it real for one another is simply beautiful. People can say it's gross, pitiful, disgusting, but, what do those people have to do with it? Each and every single human being must be able to enjoy their sex, regardless of what that implies.

Why the measures by the PP respond to natural causes

"I'll ruin, yeah, I'll ruin you!

(I'll roo!)

I've been doing things I shouldn't do! 

(Things I shouldn't do!)"

"I'm A Ruin" - Marina And The Diamonds 

There's no such thing as a wrong vote. Everybody defends their interest when casting theirs: some want x, some want y, some want a handsome president, some are being paid to vote in a certain way... Everything responds to individual interest, and that makes those votes as fair as they can be. In Spain we've got this situation that hasn't changed since the late '70s and offers a good thing and an ominous factor: we have a wide variety of political parties to choose, but absolutely nobody cares a bit about any but two or, recently, four.

So, as I stated just before, this has brought to a state where there are four shitpiles of possible choices: the PP and Ciudadanos in the right wing, and PSOE (if it survives next elections) and Podemos in the left, also known as the rest because who the F cares.

You know those artist that make super-lifelike drawings? Yeah.

The great favourite lately seems to be Ciudadanos, as shown by social media... or BuzzFeed (remember when I said some just want a handsome president? Only explanation I can find (and, still, where are the bears? I'd vote ERC)). So Ciudadanos, or C's, proves its fidelity to the right with two of its star measures: elimination of 4% extra bill on products (making 10% the minimum and causing families with low salaries to not be able to access first necessity products) and reduction of maximum contracts per capita to one (along with our shitty minimum salary, making sure all of the working class is forced into the group of families depending on the deceased 4%).

This sums it up.

The PSOE has been the only left wing option visible to sheep for decades until the formation of Podemos in 2014. After its historically lowest results in the last elections, it appears as obvious to be heading on its downfall fast towards definite extinction (yay!). There is no better way to describe the PSOE than the way Pablo Iglesias, leader of Podemos, does it: it's formed by people willing to change Spain for good and corrupted veterans (see also, 99'9%) keeping that from happening.

Podemos, within its systematical apparently weed-induced program, probably less realistic than most science fiction stories, is, for its fidelity to the left wing, the best choice for anyone whose money can't buy the soul and left kidney of every Syrian refugee in Europe, Asia and Donald Trump's mom's house.

And... And the others are the PP. Let's see what they did in their legislature of presidence:

• They've raised college prices.
• They've tried to criminalize abortions in most scenarios, even though they only got to in the case of minors under 16 without parental consent.
• They've raised college prices indirectly by adding one year to the master courses, almost doubling the original prize (raising above the triple in some sectors) of minimal qualificating education for most research or clinical careers.
• They've paralyzed tons and tons of regional and statal laws for the protection of LGBT collectives (ehm... Which mental institution did you say #SoyGayYDelPP started in?).
• They've simplified and concentered the school subject of philosophy, making it unreachable from a certain educational level to science and technology students.
• They've paralyzed the essential and necessary Law of Transsexuality (link to news in Spanish about the subject), redacted around 2010 by a trans PSOE member and active only in Madrid since weeks ago.
• They've added prices to certain public health services and cut subventions to public hospitals and drugstores.

And the list could go on and on listing the very most natural consequences of bearing a right-wing government. It seems really obvious to me: the privatizing of essential sectors like education or health and the boycott of their public faction for the benefit of those accessing private services, the systematical annihilation of the right to progress for any minority, the homogenization of points of view in students and media consumers... Everything responds to right wing interests. Did people expect anything else? Does people expect anything else from Ciudadanos, DiL, any right wing party?

Everytime you hear an acquiantance or friend is giving a vote to those parties, provided you're a worker, remember: they are voting for your annihilation.

Nothing else to say.

Why modern "science" is sometimes bullshit

(AUDIO COULD NOT BE FOUND.)

"Well, daddy likes to teach!

Counts for the muttered words you like to speak,

But it sounds like vomit to my ears!"

"Philosopher My Arse" - Marina and The Diamonds 

I don't know why, but we all spent our good time hyped about it: a group of bonobos without the ability to take conclusions out of empirical research "proved" that "straight girls are not a thing."

But before talking about that... ehem, "discovery," I want to tell you about a word. This term, if it deserves to be called anything else than a distasteful swearing word, is "autogynephilia." It describes the "fetish men who will to become female while aren't sexually attracted exclusively to men feel." It must be mentioned, too, that the same theory classifies the rest of "men willing to become female" as "homosexual transsexuals," described as "excessively effeminate homosexuals." It does not take a genius to deduce why this theory is so awful it would make a cat puke: reducing a person's identity and life choices to sex is so stupid and cruel it even sounds like Freud... literally. Actually, if I have to speak about my personal case, which just happens to be actual experience, sex is precisely the downfall: though I've exclusively found myself attracted to men so far, it does not mean I'm willing to lose sexual desire as well as sensitivity in my genitalia, which is a direct side effect of a male-to-female sexual reassignment treatment including sex-change surgery.

Which explains quite a lot.

However, the autogynephilia theory is taken as a scientific theory since it's... "based on empirical observations?" They must be kidding.

In order to sustain this unsustainable "theory," a group of nazi transphobes "scientists" asked some trans women if they preferred to carry the male or the female sex in sexual intercourse. Most answers given by those women stated that they preferred to carry the female sex, HOW UNEXPECTED. This was automatically translated to "they want to have a vagina because they fetish it," implying that, well, since cisgender women also like having a vagina during sex, every single person who conforms with the female sex fetishes it. Sorry, females, your biological sex is a fetish.

Back to the initial point, straight women don't exist because a group of "scientists" made them dissapear by clicking their fingers or some other magical method. Here's how they did it:

They showed a group of women (the paper doesn't seem to specify their biological sex, which, unlike their sexual orientation, is actually observable) lesbian porn and found out they were aroused by it. That way, sensible scientists would say they had proven:

• Humans get turned on by sex.
• As we knew since decades ago, more than 90% of humans, regardless of their biological sex and gender identity, are bisexual.

*clap clap clap*

Can somebody give this people a Nobel Prize already, please? No, no, wait, there's more: the conclusion they took wasn't any of the above. As this post has been giving away all along, this was "proof that no woman is straight." Sorry, but I know a woman or two that would get grossed out if forced to have sex with other women and wouldn't agree otherwise, so, sorry, but no.

Stop trying to apply human traits to one sex/gender or another. We human beings share idiosyncrasies as a species, and sexuality is one of them. Sorry, but women are not asexual blobs unable to feel arousal (actually, that's something the experiment actually proved) and men are not mindless apes unable to feel anything but arousal (and the fact that the [though idiotic] experiment was designed and conducted by men proves that). We have differences, but those are differences between individuals, not between collectives you have the right to separate. If instinct still had the same weight as in early evolutional stages most of the ambients we live in and the artifacts we use would be impossible.

Grow out of it, Freudians. S. Freud could easily have made up his theory while masturbating... and, actually, that would make sense to me.

The fantastic freedom to pornify absolutely anything

"It's getting late to give you up,

I took a sip from my devil cup.

Slowly,

It's taking over me.

[...]

With the taste of your lips I'm on a ride!

You're toxic, I'm slipping under...

Taste of a poison paradise!

I'm addicted to you, don't you know that you're toxic?"

"Toxic" - Britney Spears

Disney Pixar's new animated movie, Zootopia, is spreading hype within the furry fandom for predictable reasons: the concept of the anthro (anthropomorphic animal, or, if you talk the way I talk, ♥ fur yeah ♥ ) is suddenly presented to the public in a kind, family-friendly manner. This, though, has also derived in a feeling of reluctance...

Or just don't make your characters so sexy, duh!

The furry fandom seems to have a quite rich history of sexualizing anthro characters from movies and video games, going from iconic characters like Bowser to childhood icons such as the Coyote from the Road Runner, so the collective is concerned about what message the reaction of the fandom towards Zootopia might send to the general public (NOT like non-anthro characters in all ambits are also sexualized by other fandoms and people, OF COURSE NOT).

As I so subtly suggested in brackets before, though, not only the furry fandom but pretty much everyone and their mother is guilty of this. Jessica Rabbit, Courtney Gears, Lara Croft, all those characters share the idiosyncrasies of not being anthros and being sexualized by other kinds of public systematically. A simple Google search of "Courtney Gears" can easily lead a seven-year-old Ratchet & Clank fan to the porn site Rule 34, and, believe me, that is not furries' fault. In the eighties and the early nineties, the LGBT collective was lovelily known by the public as a group of perverts who wanted to rape everything alive, so, if someone is still concerned about people's generalized opinion on their collective, there are two ways to fix the issue: either educating that people through kindness and comprehension or hiding and pretending not to belong to the collective. LGBT people who have lived the eighties and the early nineties will probably agree when I say the second option is definitely not going to change anything.

And, guess what, that is OK. I like C. Gears as the diva she is in R&C 3 and I wouldn't sexualize her, but, hey, I do not mind if someone else would. While tons and tons of hentai and ecchi porn are being generated regarding the character, nobody is forcing me to watch. I can listen to Courtney's song once and again off YouTube without seeing her boobs uncovered, and I therefore do not understand why someone would get offended by the existence of that content.

Oh, no! A make-up tutorial!

But then there is the thing: kids. You could leave your child alone with your computer dancing to Gears' robotic anthem and come back to see them naively watch her naked in an anime-styled picture because they were browsing "Courtney Gears" on Google and that's what they got... Well, Mr. and Mrs. Concerned Parent, I present you HEATHER'S GUIDE TO KEEP YOUR CHILD FROM BEING THE FIRST COMMENT IN PORNHUB. It's a very simple guide, it has only one line of text, and says the following:

"Have you ever thought about being there while they surf the net?"

Crazy idea, right? I know, you might be busy at times, right? Then what about downloading (and revising, please) the content you want your child to access and offer it to them without allowing connection to the Internet? Hey, that method came straight to my mind in just fifteen seconds, it must be not so hard after all!

So, dear furries and furry fans out there; I know you mean well, and I know all you want is your collective to be considered better by the public. That is a very legitimate goal, but it seems you haven't made up the right way towards it. If there is a reaction from the public, someone will speak up. Respond, educate, be assertive, explain, show the world some love and the world will show some understanding. We're living, now more than anytime else, in a world of changes where it's likely that everybody's ideas and explanations will be heard and given a chance sooner or later.

I prefer to be taken as free better than to be taken as normal.

Difference between languages might make some less functional than others

"Well, yes, yes, yes, I'm banging on about her again

(And again, and again, and again),

'Cause I can't get those things she's been saying off my brain!

And this time I ain't mentioning no names

(No names, no names, no names),

'Cause that would make it too damn obvious."

"Yet Again" - Charli XCX

Every language has its very own idiosyncrasies. That makes the world more complete, by learning a language one can realise how the things they might take as obvious are just something more they and only they share; in other words, learning languages is a way to open one's mind. That for, our language implies a way to see the world: once you learn a someone can only be a he or a she because there is not a singular they in your language, you tend to divide humanity in he's and she's and that's going to be all of it for you.

My mother language is Spanish, and, as most Romanic Languages, it shares the idiosyncrasy of only being able to see he's and she's. It also makes it harder to build certain kinds of sentence or refer to certain kinds of objects than English. On the other hand, I've never had a problem with English that I hadn't had with Spanish before, and I've found that most problems I found with Spanish that made me use enormous periphrasys to express a simple idea could be resolved with less than three words in English.

For that matter, I took a look at  the list of my written frustrations (a.k.a. a project that was meant to become an opinion blog in Spanish) and picked some notable examples of lacks of the Spanish language that English supplies:

• I don't know about you, but I'd get offended I was referred to as ello. I know I've already said it twice in this post, but Spanish does not offer its speakers a way to refer to persons without mentioning (and mostly assuming) their gender. Well, at least, not in singular...
• In plural, we're all men. As what I first said might imply, a language brings a way to see a way to see the world with it. In case of Spanish, we're meant to assume men significant and women only deserve representation in human collectives if they are the totality of it: plurals containing male and female individuals are inherently masculine plurals.
• Everyone has gender... even tables. When I said humans can't be gender-neutral in Spanish I should have said nothing can. Chairs, tables, cupboards, oxides, everything has what is known as immotivated gender: gender for non-sexuated objects. This implies Spanish has no way to refer to anything, human or not, without assigning a gender to it, and, sorry, but, no, not all humans want to be jailed inside a gender.
• How do you call un hombre que escala montañas? A mountain-climbing man. When it comes to needing enormous periphrasys to express something than can be said in three words, Spain is populated by experts.
• Let's talk about Geography. I've got friends in Germany, Switzerland, Greece, Montenegro, even Ukraine. And none of them speak Spanish (well, one of them tries, but they don't speak very fluently). I dare you to guess which language I use to communicate with all of them...

And, well, I've only put some (and most of them are the same, to be honest: Spanish = male or sub-male), but I think I'm missing lots and lots of occasions and examples where Spanish does a terrible job at... trying. Languages are meant to allow speakers to express anything, with the differences and connotations they want in their discourse, and that's something Spanish and Catalan both fail at.

The Maldita Lisiada

 "Don't you feel

everything, everyone

is going mental?"

"Everything's Just Wonderful" - Lily Allen

Every language has a culture behind. When it comes to Spanish, this is no exception, as a language, it recognises certain compositions and events that bring its speakers to tears of pure joy. In the case of the Spanish language, History makes it hard to find one of those after 1939... this, of course, until the Maldita Lisiada happened.

This work of art was naïvely made by Telemundo, a Latin American TV producing company, without even the thought of the possibility of it becoming a meme. After years, once time had buried it within all of the televisive junk the company represents, the Internet found it... And it did what the Internet does best: bringing it back to life... as a lisiado phoenix.

I keep thinking this is what we should study in Spanish. Because everything else about the language is irrelevant and you know it.

On the other hand, this makes up for a perfect cult movie: The Lisiada Syndrome. It  would be about a devil who possesses people making them shout "MALDITA LISIADAAAAA" all the time and spit foam. Also, it's my idea so the hero must be fat. Despite that, though, I would pay to watch it for sure. Then I would scream "MALDITA LISIADAAAAAAAA!" with all of my heart and lungs and I'd know I can finally die in peace. That's every human's life goal.

Too serious, I know :/